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Seminar Announcement Date: Thursday, 28 August 2025 Time: 11.45 AM Venue: Seminar Hall Making Secure Multiparty Computation Efficient Using New Assumptions and Resources Varun Narayanan 28-08-25 Abstract Secure Multiparty computation (MPC) is a fundamental primitive in cryptography that enables mutually distrusting parties to collaborate using their private data via a communication protocol, eliminating the need for a trusted intermediary. A key obstacle to deploying MPC in practice is that secure protocols are typically far less efficient than their non-secure counterparts. In this talk, I will present three lines of research with my collaborators that address these challenges. First, I will discuss results on achieving communication-efficient general MPC in a constant number of rounds, together with lower bounds that highlight inherent complexity barriers. Second, I will describe how planted graph assumptions and their variants can be leveraged to build MPC primitives—such as secret sharing and private simultaneous messages—that use only logarithmic-sized, reusable public information. Finally, I will introduce the model of one-way secure computation, which exploits noise in communication channels to enable secure function evaluation. This model yields both positive and negative results, with applications to cryptographic puzzles and e-cash systems. Bio: Varun Narayanan just completed postdoctoral research in the Computer Science department at UCLA, hosted by Prof. Rafail Ostrovsky. He previously held a postdoctoral position at Technion, working with Prof. Yuval Ishai and Prof. Eyal Kushilevitz. He earned his PhD from TIFR, Mumbai, advised by Dr. Vinod Prabhakaran. Varun’s research focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of cryptography, with an emphasis on secure multiparty computation.
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